Our One Common Country (36 page)

Lee wrote to Grant on March 2, saying Longstreet had spoken with Ord about “a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties
by means of a military convention.” Ord had said that Grant would agree to see him if Lee had authority to act. Lee said he did. “Sincerely desiring to leave nothing untried which may put an end to the calamities of war,” he proposed to meet at a time and place of Grant's choosing. Displaying some eagerness, he suggested eleven o'clock on Monday morning, at the place where Ord met Longstreet.

Even before Grant reported Lee's note to Washington, he ordered a subordinate to tell Longstreet that his reply would be delivered at noon the next day. Then Grant wired Lee's note to Stanton, and deceived him again. Ord and Longstreet had met at
Longstreet's
request,
Grant said,
to arrange
a prisoner exchange
.
“A general conversation ensued on the subject of the war, and has induced the above letter. I have not returned any reply, but promised to do so at 12 tomorrow. I respectfully request instructions.” Grant did not deny Lee's claim that Grant wanted to see him about ending the war.

The president was signing bills in his Capitol office with Seward, Stanton, Nicolay, and Hay when Stanton handed him Grant's telegram. According to Nicolay and Hay, he spoke not a word and wrote a dispatch to Grant, which he showed to Seward and handed to Stanton. An alternate account said Lincoln was thrilled by the thought of Grant making peace with Lee, until Stanton spoke: Tomorrow was Inauguration Day, and the president had better not take the oath if he would hand to the generals his responsibility to make peace. Whichever way it happened, Lincoln wrote a message to Grant for Stanton's signature:

 

The President directs me to say to you that he wishes you to have no conference with General Lee, unless it be for the capitulation of General Lee's army or on some minor and purely military matter. He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands, and will submit them to no military conference or conventions. Meantime you are to press to the utmost your military advantages.

 

Telling Grant that the president had written it, Stanton fired the message off with a sharp cover note, as if Lincoln's were not sharp enough. “I
will add that General Ord's conduct in holding intercourse with General Longstreet upon political questions not committed to his charge is not approved. . . . You will please in future instruct officers appointed to meet rebel officers to confine themselves to the matters specifically committed to them.” A newspaperman close to Grant said he took it as “an open rebuke.” It did not make him fonder of Stanton.

Lincoln's negativity on generals negotiating peace was more than merely driven by the principle of civilian control. In the opinion of Gideon Welles, far from fearing leniency, he suspected that his generals preferred to prolong the war, and “exact severe terms.” There was cause for such suspicions. Sherman was crushing the Southern people, not just their troops. U. S. Grant, also known as Unconditional Surrender Grant, resented Lincoln's soft-hearted pardons of deserters. General George Stoneman said Lincoln predicted one night that his head would ache the next evening. “Tomorrow is hangman's day and I shall have to act upon death sentences.” Stoneman never forgot the look that came over him. Grant had no such headaches.

But Lincoln had misread his man. Grant betrayed his eagerness to see Lee in a dispatch to a subordinate, before he heard from Stanton: “You may say to General Longstreet that I will send my reply to General Lee's communication as early as possible, but may not be able to do so today.” When Stanton's wire arrived, quashing the whole thing, Grant replied to Lee and clarified “a misunderstanding” on the issue of exchanging prisoners charged with capital crimes. Then he turned to the issue of generals making peace, another misunderstanding:

 

I have no authority to accede to your proposition for a conference on the subject proposed. Such authority is vested in the President of the United States alone. General Ord could only have meant that I would not refuse an interview on any subject on which I have a right to act, which, of course, would be such as are purely of military character, and on the subject of exchanges which has been entrusted to me.

 

Then Grant wired Stanton: He had written to Lee; a copy would be sent to Stanton. “I can assure you that no act of the enemy will prevent me
from pressing all advantages gained to the utmost of my ability. Neither will I, under any circumstances, exceed my authority or in any way embarrass the Government. It was because I had no right to meet General Lee on the subject
proposed by him
[emphasis added] that I referred the matter for instructions.”

Stanton's reply was conciliatory. No imputations had been intended. The president had merely wished to make it plain that “the enemy had a purpose in desiring to enter into political negotiations with military officers.”
Stanton did not specify the nefarious purpose in question.

Grant's rejection of a parlay with Lee was published in Richmond immediately. Judge Campbell's friend Robert Kean thought it was made public “to follow up the Hampton Roads business, and make our people desperate.”

In Washington City, the 38th Congress adjourned and went home on Saturday, March 4, Inauguration Day. The 39ths, still more hostile to a generous reconstruction, would not arrive until December, leaving Lincoln alone on the stage for nine months. Having given his inaugural address “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” he was bent on luring the South back in a reconciling mood before Congress could stop him.

In Richmond, General Gorgas was in no such mood, and despised men who were. “The Senate, it is now said, are ready for
any
terms—the cowards. Pity a few could not be taken out and hung or shot.” If a soldier may be shot for cowardice, “why may not the craven Senator be made to yield his dastard life in the same way?”

Like his nemesis Alec Stephens, Benjamin Hill had left for Georgia, where he filled the great void left by Stephens's silent tongue. On Saturday, March 11, Hill assembled an array of women, children, old men, and crippled veterans and scorned the Yankee offer made at Hampton Roads. The army would not be degraded, not with half a million men under arms east of the Mississippi (a wild exaggeration). “Support the President,” he told the helpless crowd, “support the generals; supply the army; drive off the traitors; confound the critics; and then you will be able to defy the enemy; arrest disasters; and win independence.”

As for South Carolina, where the rebellion had begun with whoops and cheers and blood-red sashes over dashing gray uniforms, Mary Chesnut mourned what Sherman had done to her capital. “Columbia is but dust and ashes, burned to the ground. Men, women and children are left there houseless, homeless, without a particle of food.” Among other soft targets, Sherman's men had torched a convent. Socialites were subsisting on scraps of scattered corn left behind on the ground by his horses.

In early March, Lee told Davis that his army must retreat within weeks. Richmond would fall when it did, which would cripple his men's morale. The loss of its factories would be devastating too, but the government could regroup, arms could be made elsewhere. Davis asked Lee if he should not withdraw at once, but the general said his underfed horses were too weak to pull wagons and artillery through the mud. He must wait for the roads to firm up. He proposed to withdraw to Danville, Virginia, when the time came. He might be able to fight his way to Johnston. As Davis saw the vision, Lee's shattered troops would combine with Johnston's to be “hurled upon Sherman in North Carolina, with the hope of defeating him before Grant could come to his relief.” Deserters would return, Grant would be drawn into a hostile population, and “Virginia be delivered from the invader.”

Days later, Lee had to change his plans. With Grant almost ready to turn his right flank, he proposed to attack Fort Stedman on his left. If he succeeded, Grant's connections to City Point would be threatened. If he failed, which was likely, he would force Grant to shift his forces “and delay the impending disaster for the more convenient season for retreat.” Davis approved the disaster-delaying plan.

Sarah Pryor's husband had enjoyed a colorful career as an American diplomat in Greece, a US congressman, a target of Thaddeus Stevens, and a Confederate congressman turned general. He resigned when Davis denied him a higher command, reenlisted as a scout, and was captured and imprisoned in New York Harbor as a suspected spy. Horace Greeley
and other Northerners persuaded Lincoln to release him. Grant had wanted him held. Stanton had wanted him hanged. The fulfillment of Hunter's promise to try to get him freed may have saved his life.

Now Pryor and two friends who had worked for his release came to the White House and asked the president to reprieve John Yates Beall, Pryor's recent cellmate, who had plotted to derail passenger trains carrying Rebel prisoners through upstate New York. Lincoln said he grieved for the young man and his family but must yield to the officer in command in New York, who said a hanging was necessary to deter terrorism.
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Moved by the loss of another young life and a need to deny responsibility for it, Lincoln turned the conversation to the conference at Hampton Roads. If Mr. Davis had accepted reunion and abolition, his people might have been paid for their slaves and enjoyed a general amnesty, but Mr. Davis had demanded independence. Now he would be responsible for the futile, wicked loss of every drop of blood to be shed for the rest of the war, when its outcome was clear to every sane man. Lincoln could not believe that Mr. Davis's “senseless obstinacy” reflected his people's sentiments.

Pryor took it as a plea. He would soon tell his wife how he pleaded too, with Hunter and other sane men in Richmond, “but with one voice they assured him that nothing could be done with Mr. Davis, and that the South had only to wait the imminent and inevitable catastrophe.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

With Cheerful Confidence in the Result

Born in 1793, the Confederacy's gray eminence, William Cabell Rives, had deep-set eyes, an intelligent forehead, and a formidable résumé. Thomas Jefferson had taught him the law. James Madison had been his friend. He had long since dismissed the notion of slavery as a positive good as an “obsolete and revolting” idea. He had served with distinction as Jackson's minister to Paris, a US senator, and a delegate to the Washington peace convention of 1861. He had followed Virginia out of the Union like a mourner in a funeral procession. Now Lee had lately told him that “true policy required us to close the war on the best terms we could.” As chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he had long supported Davis but had recently resigned, pleading age and ill health.

Toward the middle of March, Judge Campbell asked Rives to draft for the Senate a resolution urging Davis to offer reunion on reasonable terms. It was Hunter's old idea, but with Rives as its author it could not be ignored. While cherishing the cause, Rives wrote, the Senate had concluded that the Confederacy must yield, “as the proudest and most valiant of nations have done in like circumstances, to the stern law of necessity and the apparent decree of Heaven,” to avoid pointless bloodshed “and avert the horrors of a savage and relentless subjugation by a triumphant armed force of every race and complexion.”

At Campbell's request, Senator Graham agreed to submit the resolution, with no time to lose. He returned it to the judge that night. Senators had said there was no point. Davis would ignore it if it passed.

A few days later, the Confederate Congress expired with the War Department's reports of its extremity clutched in its dying hands. “It is
not the part of statesmanship to close our eyes upon them,” Judge Campbell had said. Davis did just that. He sealed them and sent them in secret to Congress without comment, accompanied by a
public
message that politely accused the House and Senate of incompetent neglect and proposed emergency legislation to help win the war. Allowing that “our country is in danger,” its president declared that the war could be waged “with cheerful confidence” in the result, and with no honorable alternative. Mr. Lincoln had decreed at Hampton Roads that no treaty would be made, that “in the event of our penitent submission, he would temper justice with mercy,” that the victors would decide whether the South would have self-government. Mr. Lincoln had rebuffed the peace commissioners' suggestion that Grant could treat with Lee, but had promised to reconsider. Davis had thought General Ord's overture to General Longstreet was the result, but that door too had closed, and the people of the Confederacy “could be but little known to him who supposed it possible that they would consent to live in a country garrisoned by its own Negroes and governed by its conqueror, in degradation and slavery.”

Davis's supply of unconscious irony was inexhaustible, but his rhetoric had weight. Lincoln and Seward had left him too much running room. The hints of conciliation they had dropped at Hampton Roads were not enough to stop him from inciting a longer war or to give his opposition a clearly marked roadmap to peace. On March 18, Davis gathered in his office the entire Virginia congressional delegation, his Cabinet, and General Lee, who recounted the army's destitution but made no recommendation. “He was a soldier,” said a congressman who was there, “and doubtless felt that it was not his province to volunteer advice to the political department.” All fifteen legislators said Virginia stood ready to do what was asked of her.

The Confederate Congress adjourned that day in the moral wreckage of Richmond, never to reconvene. Among its last acts, it adopted a resolution, with one dissenting vote, to keep fighting until independence was won. “Failure,” it said, “will compel us to drink the cup of humiliation even to the bitter dregs of having the history of our struggle written by New England historians.” Edward Pollard would soon submit that Congress had abandoned its post like cowards, unwilling to witness the end,
but not before a Senate committee lashed back at Davis, consuming precious time and no little paper to support the proposition that the Southern people's president, not their Congress, had waged the war ineptly. A record had been left in the ruins.
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The wildly whiskered Senator Louis T. Wigfall, a South Carolinian by birth, a Texan by choice, an arsonist by disposition, had been a Davis ally in the old Senate, but had long since adjudged him “an amalgam of malice and mediocrity.” On the day the Confederate Congress left Richmond for good, Wigfall amused Judge Campbell with a copy of a Virginian's speech in the House proposing the ludicrous notion of an alliance with the United States to eject the French from Mexico. Wigfall said he intended to read it between his conviction for treason and his execution, “thinking it would tend to reconcile me to death.” Knowing more than Wigfall did, Campbell said he would postpone reading it until after his execution.

The judge told a friend that he understood he was “in high disfavor” in the Davis administration, regarded as a sort of leader of the opposition for his efforts to “put backbone” into Mr. Hunter and Mr. Graham. High disfavor was the least of it. In the eyes of his cornered president, Campbell had joined the cabal.

On Thursday, March 23, Lincoln and his family left Washington on the
River Queen,
bound for City Point, invited by General Grant, escorted by the aptly named
Bat,
a captured blockade runner, one of the fastest ships in the navy. “There is no doubt he is much worn down,” Gideon Welles told his diary; “besides, he wishes the War terminated, and, to this end, that severe terms shall not be exacted of the Rebels.” He had leapt at the chance to escape the capital and plan the war's end from a vantage point closer to the scene than Major Eckert's telegraph office. It was no joyful news for Stanton, who was not invited. The Secretary of War assigned a captain to shadow the commander in chief.

No better quarters being available, the Lincolns stayed on the
River Queen,
snug but no hardship. The president saw Grant for the first time since the peace conference. They mourned its failure together. If the commissioners had agreed to reunion and abolition, Lincoln said, “he was almost willing to hand them a blank sheet of paper with his signature attached for them to fill in the terms upon which they were willing to live with us in the Union and be one people.”

Now it was almost too late.

On Saturday, March 25, hours before the attack on Fort Stedman that Davis had approved as a desperate throw of the dice, Lee spoke with General John B. Gordon, who would lead it. Knowing how slim were its chances, they agreed that another peace overture was the better course, on whatever terms the South could get. Uneasy with his conscience, Gordon asked Lee if he had so advised the government. Lee replied that he was a soldier. His duty was to obey orders, and advise the civilian government on military matters. “It is enough to turn a man's hair gray to spend one day in that Congress,” he said. Its members “will neither take the responsibility of acting nor will they clothe me with authority to act. As for Mr. Davis, he is unwilling to do anything short of independence, and feels that it is useless to try to treat on that basis.” Lee felt free to add that Mr. Davis was “very pertinacious in opinion and purpose.”

Gordon's troops took Fort Stedman before dawn. Within hours, led by General John F. Hartranft, Northern troops took it back, inflicting some 4,800 Southern casualties, bringing pain to some 4,800 Southern families, costing Lee 10 percent of his army. The South had nothing to show for them.

Generals Hartranft and Gordon called a truce to recover their dead and wounded. Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, the dead General Pegram's friend, oversaw the Southern work. “Men ran over the field from each side and gathered up their comrades.” A federal officer noticed an unusually large number of shattered legs and thighs. As the stretcher bearers worked, other men traded and gossiped with their enemies, and Douglas and Hartranft discovered that they had both gone to Franklin and
Marshall College. Douglas gave the Northerner a letter to send to his Virginia home, now in federal hands. He would later learn that Hartranft, a future Pennsylvania governor, had added a kind note of his own. As they took each other's hands, a Northern major made a partial delivery for which Douglas wrote out a receipt. It was found among Hartranft's papers when he died: “Received of Major Bertolette: 120 dead and 15 wounded in the engagement of the 25th March 1865.”

Two days later, General Sherman and Admiral David Dixon Porter, a heavily bearded man who had joined the navy at the soft age of ten, arrived at City Point to confer with Lincoln and Grant in the
River Queen
's saloon, three weeks after the peace conference. As Sherman and Porter later told it, Lincoln was ready for peace on almost any terms. “Must more blood be shed? Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?” Once the Rebels went home, “they won't take up arms again. Let them all go, officers and all. I want submission, and no more bloodshed. Let them have their horses to plow with and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with. I want no one punished. Treat them liberally all round. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.” When asked what to do with captured civilian leaders, Lincoln told a story about an Irishman who had sworn off liquor but told a barman he would take a spiked lemonade, so long as the brandy went in “unbeknownst to meself.” The officers inferred that Davis and his circle should be left to flee the country, unbeknownst to Abraham Lincoln.

Johnston must soon surrender, Sherman said. As Sherman would later have it, Lincoln let him know that Johnston should be given almost any terms that would induce him. “Only don't let us have any more bloodshed if it can be avoided.” His generals said they would do their best, but a last big battle might have to be fought.